Jerry Jeudy’s rookie year didn’t quite live up to expectations.
While his route-running already appears to be among the elite class in the NFL and his explosiveness is beyond tantalizing, injuries, drops and other mental hiccups hurt his 2020 output.
“Jeudy had a bad case of the yips in 2020,” PFF analyst Anthony Treash wrote in an article forecasting 2021 breakout stars. “He caught just 76.5% of his catchable targets on the year, the worst rate in the NFL. And of the ones he didn’t catch, 17.6% went down as a drop. Jeudy had a fairly high target volume, with over 110 passes thrown his way, so this is not good. As a matter of fact, his drop rate is the fifth-worst since 2010 among wide receivers with at least 100 targets in a single season.”
However, Pro Football Focus thinks 2021 will be a very different story for the talented young receiver.
“On top of the drops, poor quarterback play limited Jeudy’s production,” Treash wrote. “No receiver had a higher rate of their targets result in a quarterback-fault incompletion this season than the rookie. The Alabama product also racked up the most targets on which he created separation that resulted in a quarterback-fault incompletion.”
A potential upgrade at quarterback is a massive reason to feel optimistic about Jeudy, but the high-variance rate of drops from season to season is another.
“It’s worth noting that drop rate is one of the most unstable metrics at the wide receiver position,” Treash wrote. “Despite Jeudy’s struggles, we saw the same elite route-running chops, deep speed and quickness at the line of scrimmage against press coverage that made him such a highly touted prospect coming out of college. His 2021 production is still going to be skewed by whichever quarterback Denver trots out, but regardless, I’d bet the farm Jeudy becomes a top-10 wide receiver in the NFL for years to come.
